In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Business & Human Rights

23 Jun

[Jindan-Karena Mann is a PhD Researcher at the University of Amsterdam and Nicky Touw is a PhD Researcher at the Open University of the Netherlands.] The North Mara gold mine in Tanzania has been under scrutiny for many years now. Reports paint a picture of ongoing corruption, environmental harms, and human rights violations, including the excessive use of force by private security and police forces working with the mining...

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22 Jun

[Radu Mares is an Associate Professor, Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Lund University (radu.mares@rwi.lu.se)] The last two decades marked a dramatic expansion of civil liability cases against parent companies. In this period, transnational litigation offered a way to get around the legislative inaction or slowness. Indeed, civil liability principles already exist in all home states. They apply to both natural...

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21 Jun

[Ekaterina Aristova is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. Carlos Lopez is a Senior Legal Advisor at the International Commission of Jurists.] Past decades saw an emerging trend towards reliance on civil liability claims to address business-related human rights abuses. A movement that had initial impetus from the United States of America has now expanded to other continents, especially to Europe. The...

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18 Jun

[Doreen Lustig is a Senior Lecturer at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and the author of Veiled Power: International Law and the Private Corporation 1886-1981 (Oxford University Press, 2020).] Ingo Venzke and Kevin Jon Heller’s edited volume Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories (Oxford University Press, 2021) (hereinafter: Contingency) is a rare editorial accomplishment. A coherent and multifaceted...

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11 Jun

[Sam Zarifi is the Secretary General of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). The list of questions in this post was crafted with the input of ICJ and the Opinio Juris Editorial Board.] Recently, Opinio Juris featured a contribution from Miranda Sissons, Facebook's Human Rights Director, outlining Facebook's newly launched human rights policy with the agreement that Facebook would engage in...

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07 May

[Vivek Bhatt is a Senior Research Officer at the University of Essex and a member of the Essex Human Rights Centre. The project ‘Ensuring Respect for Human Rights in Locked-down Care Homes’ is funded by the AHRC as part of its UKRI COVID-19 Rapid Response funding scheme. Grant number: AH/V012770/1.] Photo: Sarah Tew, CNET     In February 2021, the UK...

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04 May

Summer School Al-Haq International Law Online Summer School Program: Al-Haq Center for Applied International Law is pleased to announce its Seventh International Law Summer School for professionals, legal researchers, post-graduates and academics in the fields of international law and human rights. The 2021 program will run entirely online through ten days from 31st May – 12th June 2021. The summer school aims to assist professionals...

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09 Apr

[Rhona Smith is Professor of International Human Rights at Newcastle Law School.]Photo credit: Rhona Smith The précis presented herein is simple, all States are obliged both to ‘build back better’ in the wake of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and to be better prepared for COVID-19, any future variations and indeed other pandemics. These obligations are grounded in international laws and frameworks...

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29 Mar

[Valentine Kunuji is a Commonwealth Scholarship alumnus and is currently a Doctoral Researcher at the Law School, University of East Anglia, Norwich UK, and his research is focused on International Law with particular reference to Business and Human Rights, International Investment Law, Access to Justice and Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Twitter: olu_11] Photo credit: Al Jazeera “You can never, never defeat Shell in...

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25 Mar

[Clare Brown is the Deputy Director of Victim Advocates International. She is Assistant to Counsel in a submission filed on behalf of 64 Rohingya to the International Criminal Court, requesting the court to consider holding hearings in Bangladesh.]  On 16 March, Miranda Sissons, the inaugural Director of Human Rights for Facebook, posted an article on Opinio Juris announcing the launch...

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23 Mar

By Tim Fish Hodgson, Legal Adviser on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights at the International Commission of Jurists and Rossella De Falco, Programme Officer on the Right to Health at Global Initiative on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Historically pandemics have often catalyzed significant social change. As historian of epidemics Frank Snowden puts it: “epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold...

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22 Mar

[Neema Hakim is a third-year law student at the University of Chicago Law School, Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Journal of International Law, and a 2021 Salzburg Cutler Fellow.] Photo credit: European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations Last week, Facebook released a “corporate human rights policy,” eight years after learning that its platform was being used in Myanmar to spread hatred which...

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